Famines are not genocides lol. Though I suppose you could make the case that the embargo on the USSR caused a lot of excess deaths. Famines were extremely common before the USSR took power because it was a pre-industrial society, the USSR ended that. Also, the USSR is a completely different government from the Russian Federation.

I disagree that the previous government was a puppet government.

My political aims go against the interests of the US, so generally groups that are aligned with my aims oppose and are opposed by the US. I don't believe in judging every conflict as a disinterested third party with no consideration of past events or present conditions. The US has a long history of installing far-right governments, has an atrocious record of human rights, and violates sovereignty left and right, and that is relevant to who I support.

I do believe in giving critical support to just about anyone who's willing to disrupt the unipolar world order in which the US has license to act as a rogue state. I want everyone involved in starting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to face a war crimes tribunal and be shot or hanged, and I support things that bring us closer to that goal. You, on the other hand, want to keep blindly trusting those same people to tell us who our enemies are. The only way to put any check on the US's rampant militarism and aggression is through a multipolar world order.

I don't think they're implying anything like that? A Russian source talking about a bad thing Russia did is generally more reliable than a CIA source saying the same thing, since there's less incentive to make stuff up.

I don't think I've seen this position before and it sounds pretty wild ngl. Let me just lay out my understanding.

Mao disagreed with the party on the basis that he felt the peasants had more revolutionary potential than the small, new proletariat working in what few factories existed in China. Mao's arguments were rejected, and the party's commitment to rigid ideology over analysis of the specific material conditions of China led to them being crushed by the Nationalists and massacred. It's the whole reason that the Long March happened.

The few surviving members of the party regrouped, though they were hunted to the ends of the earth and had extremely little manpower or resources. Despite this, because they used Mao's approach of appealing to the peasants, who reflected the majority of the working poor, the communist revolution spread like wildfire, gaining more and more supporters everywhere it went.

I don't deny that the party before Mao had good intentions, but it seems to me that history has proven their approach wrong in an incredibly decisive way. They tried their approach when the party was in a better position and failed miserably, they tried Mao's approach after that miserable failure and it succeeded on an enormous scale. I'm pretty curious to know where you disagree with that.

That's why I put it behind a spoiler to avoid clogging up the thread.

I put in the time of reading the book in the first place, then I remembered a relevant bit so I went back and looked through the book to try to find it, read through it again to make sure it was actually relevant, edited it because it was from a pdf and had wierd line breaks, and considered which parts were relevant to include and whether I should omit some of the examples. I cited that book not only because it expressed what I wanted to say, but also because it's written in a modern style that's easier to read than many socialist works.

I guess I'm just used to an environment on Hexbear where people are more receptive towards reading relevant theory and some of us actually read not just posts and excerpts, but whole entire books. Maybe I should've just posted Pig Poop Balls instead.

There's a reason that race is included though, and that reason is that fascism aims to strengthen and reinforce existing hierarchies. That generally includes race, gender, sexual orientation, class, disabilities, etc. Theoretically it's conceivable that you could have a political project that includes all of that except for race, but in practice it's extremely unlikely that a fascist project would exclude it, which is why it's mentioned in the definition.

Communists (esp. Marxist-Leninists) believe in using political power to reduce or remove these hierarchies, even if it requires the use of force. For instance, I think it's good that slave owners in the US were forcibly suppressed and the people they enslaved were liberated. Does that "willingness to forcibly suppress the opposition" make me (and Lincoln) a fascist, even though my goals and values are completely opposite to those of fascists?

If "the opposition" in your definition is taken to include groups that would also forcibly suppress their opposition given the opportunity, then it seems that Webster's has unintentionally baked in assumptions from which the only conclusion is something like anarcho-pacifism, while labelling all states as inherently fascist. This is either a bad definition, or a bad interpretation of the definition.

"Fighting corruption" is an interesting way to describe sustained artillery bombardments of civilian targets.

Sometimes in life, you just gotta go wherever your heart takes you, no matter how many people try to tell you it's a bad idea, and even if it doesn't make sense - especially when it doesn't make sense!

This was not one of those times.

No, I'm not taking a Russian quote, I'm taking commentary from an article from the Kyev Post which equates a Russian quote about "Freezing the war on the current lines" as not winning for Russia. That implies that the Kyev Post considers freezing the war on the current lines as a victory for Ukraine, which contradicts the idea that Ukraine would need to reclaim territory to achieve victory. How on earth am I being dishonest, an idiot, or a liar?

The Russian commander of the “Vostok” Battalion fighting in southern Ukraine said on Thursday that Ukraine will not be defeated and suggested that Russia freeze the war along current frontlines.

"Freezing the war along the current frontlines" is victory for Russia?? They already control all the territory they claim. I guess at this point Ukraine is starting to define winning as mere survival.

But likely just 50 cent army.

Sorry, but I'm actually not allowed to get paid for my China posts because of a noncompete clause I signed from when George Soros hired me as a crisis actor. I'm not allowed to be a paid actor in any other conspiracy theories right now, so I'm just defending China pro-bono to keep my posting skills sharp so I can try to get on as a wumao once my contract is up.